Gross Domestic Problem: The politics behind the world’s most powerful number

Monday 4th Feb 2013

1-2.30 pm

Thomas Paine Study Centre: Room TPSC 0.1

All Welcome

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is arguably the best-known statistic in the contemporary world, and certainly amongst the most powerful. Yet this popular icon of economic growth has increasingly been called into question. Lorenzo Fioramonti will take apart the ‘content’ of GDP and reveal the powerful political interests that have allowed it to dominate today’s economy. In doing so he asks if we can continue to sacrifice the environment to safeguard a vision of the world based on the illusion of infinite economic growth. Discussants Gill Seyfang and Alex Haxeltine will reflect on Professor Fioramonti’s ideas based on their experiences of grass roots innovations and the Transitions Town movement as alternative, more bottom-up, ways to organise our economy.

Lorenzo Fioramonti is Africa’s first EU Jean Monet Chair and Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.